Using Backup Insights

Using Backup Insights

Topic

This article explains the Backup Insights feature available for Datto SIRIS.

Environment

Datto SIRIS

Description

Background

Backup Insights empowers you to analyze the changes between any two recovery points for a selected system on your Datto appliance. It shows the files that changed between the points and allows for instant restore of those files from the GUI.

Use this feature if you are trying to determine why significant data churn occurred between backups, or when you are troubleshooting an event that caused data discrepancy between backups.

Technical Notes

Backup Insightsfor ReFS is currently unsupported. Any ReFS volumes in the selected snapshot will be excluded from the comparison.

Backup Insights is only available on Datto SIRIS for Windows-based backups.

To access this feature, use of a Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome web browser is required. Using Internet Explorer may produce unreliable results.

UI Tour

To launch Backup Insights, access the Datto appliance's GUI, and click the Advanced tab. Select Backup Insights. You will see the Start a Recovery Point Comparison window shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Start a Recovery Point Comparison (click to enlarge)

How to Use Backup Insights

Choose an agent to compare recovery points

Choose the two recovery points that you want to compare

Click Start Comparison

The recovery points will mount and the comparison will begin. The process may take a minute or more to complete, especially for agents with large or multiple volumes, because the comparison needs to traverse the entire filesystem and track the changes.

Backup insights does not support NAS share comparisons. To compare NAS shares, use WinMerge.

Interpreting the Results of a Comparison

An example of a Backup Insights comparison is shown in Figure 2 below.

Figure 2: Results of a Backup Insights comparison (click to enlarge)

The comparison displays every file that was modified, added, or removed between the two snapshots of the protected system.

You can restore either version of a file by clicking its name. To download an entire directory, click the ↓ icon next to the folder name.

A guide to the file icons shown in the filesystem tree is shown in Figure 3. Mousing over any icon in the Backup Insights GUI will also display a tooltip with icon information.